pablo picasso life biography

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.

(1881-1973)

Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. Picasso's mother was Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher.

His gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.

A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him destined for greatness.

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he later recalled. "Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

Though he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing at a very young age. According to legend, his first words were "piz, piz," his childish attempt at saying "lápiz," the Spanish word for pencil.

Picasso's father began teaching him to draw and paint when he was a child, and by the time he was 13 years old, his skill level had surpassed his father's. Soon, Picasso lost all desire to do any schoolwork, choosing to spend the school days doodling in his notebook instead.

"For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on," he later remembered. "I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping."

In 1895, when Picasso was 14 years old, his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he quickly applied to the city's prestigious School of Fine Arts. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso's entrance exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted.

Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the School of Fine Arts' strict rules and formalities, and began skipping class so that he could roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed.

In 1897, a 16-year-old Picasso moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando. However, he again became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques.

During this time, he wrote to a friend: "They just go on and on about the same old stuff: Velázquez for painting, Michelangelo for sculpture." Once again, Picasso began skipping class to wander the city and paint what he observed: gypsies, beggars and prostitutes, among other things.

In 1899, Picasso moved back to Barcelona and fell in with a crowd of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a café called El Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats").

Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break from the classical methods in which he had been trained, and began what would become a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.

Picasso remains renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life's work seems to be the product of five or six great artists rather than just one.

Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso insisted that his varied work was not indicative of radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather, of his dedication to objectively evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effect.

"Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should," he explained. "Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it."

Blue Period

Art critics and historians typically break Picasso's adult career into distinct periods, the first of which lasted from 1901 to 1904 and is called his "Blue Period," after the color that dominated nearly all of his paintings over these years.

At the turn of the 20th century, Picasso moved to Paris, France — the center of European art — to open his own studio. Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green.

'Blue Nude’ and ‘The Old Guitarist’

Picasso's most famous paintings from the Blue Period include "Blue Nude," "La Vie" and "The Old Guitarist," all three of which were completed in 1903.

In contemplation of Picasso and his Blue Period, writer and critic Charles Morice once asked, "Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?"

Rose Period: 'Gertrude Stein' and 'Two Nudes'

By 1905, Picasso had largely overcome the depression that had previously debilitated him, and the artistic manifestation of Picasso's improved spirits was the introduction of warmer colors—including beiges, pinks and reds—in what is known as his "Rose Period" (1904-06).

Not only was he madly in love with a beautiful model, Fernande Olivier, he was newly prosperous thanks to the generous patronage of art dealer Ambroise Vollard. His most famous paintings from these years include "Family at Saltimbanques" (1905), "Gertrude Stein" (1905-06) and "Two Nudes" (1906).

Cubism was an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque.

In Cubist paintings, objects are broken apart and reassembled in an abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes and depicting them from multiple, simultaneous viewpoints in order to create physics-defying, collage-like effects. At once destructive and creative, Cubism shocked, appalled and fascinated the art world.

‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’

In 1907, Picasso produced a painting that today is considered the precursor and inspiration of Cubism: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

A chilling depiction of five nude prostitutes, abstracted and distorted with sharp geometric features and stark blotches of blues, greens and grays, the work was unlike anything he or anyone else had ever painted before and would profoundly influence the direction of art in the 20th century.

"It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire," Braque said, explaining that he was shocked when he first viewed Picasso's "Les Demoiselles." Braque quickly became intrigued with Cubism, seeing the new style as a revolutionary movement.

French writer and critic Max Jacob, a good friend of both Picasso and painter Juan Gris, called Cubism "the 'Harbinger Comet' of the new century," stating, "Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end."

Picasso's early Cubist paintings, known as his "Analytic Cubist" works, include "Three Women" (1907), "Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table" (1909) and "Girl with Mandolin" (1910).

His later Cubist works are distinguished as "Synthetic Cubism" for moving even further away from artistic typicalities of the time, creating vast collages out of a great number of tiny, individual fragments. These paintings include "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912), "Card Player" (1913-14) and "Three Musicians" (1921).

Classical Period: ‘Three Women at the Spring’

Picasso’s works between 1918 and 1927 are categorized as part of his "Classical Period," a brief return to Realism in a career otherwise dominated by experimentation. The outbreak of World War I ushered in the next great change in Picasso's art.

He grew more somber and, once again, preoccupied with the depiction of reality. His most interesting and important works from this period include "Three Women at the Spring" (1921), "Two Women Running on the Beach/The Race" (1922) and "The Pipes of Pan" (1923).

From 1927 onward, Picasso became caught up in a new philosophical and cultural movement known as Surrealism , the artistic manifestation of which was a product of his own Cubism.

Picasso's most well-known Surrealist painting, deemed one of the greatest paintings of all time, was completed in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War: "Guernica." After Nazi German bombers supporting Francisco Franco 's Nationalist forces carried out a devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso, outraged by the bombing and the inhumanity of war, painted this work of art.

In black, white and grays, the painting is a Surrealist testament to the horrors of war, and features a minotaur and several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror. "Guernica" remains one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.

Later Works: 'Self Portrait Facing Death'

In contrast to the dazzling complexity of Synthetic Cubism, Picasso's later paintings display simple, childlike imagery and crude technique. Touching on the artistic validity of these later works, Picasso once remarked upon passing a group of school kids in his old age, "When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael , but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

In the aftermath of World War II , Picasso became more overtly political, joining the Communist Party. He was twice honored with the International Lenin Peace Prize, first in 1950 and again in 1961.

By this point in his life, he was also an international celebrity, the world's most famous living artist. While paparazzi chronicled his every move, however, few paid attention to his art during this time. Picasso continued to create art and maintain an ambitious schedule in his later years, superstitiously believing that work would keep him alive.

Picasso created the epitome of his later work, "Self Portrait Facing Death," using pencil and crayon, a year before his death. The autobiographical subject, drawn with crude technique, appears as something between a human and an ape, with a green face and pink hair. Yet the expression in his eyes, capturing a lifetime of wisdom, fear and uncertainty, is the unmistakable work of a master at the height of his powers.

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A lifelong womanizer, Picasso had countless relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses and prostitutes, marrying only twice.

He wed a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova in 1918, and they remained together for nine years, parting ways in 1927. They had a son together, Paulo. In 1961, at the age of 79, he married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque.

While married to Khokhlova, he began a long-term relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. They had a daughter, Maya, together. Walter committed suicide after Picasso died.

Between marriages, in 1935, Picasso met Dora Maar, a fellow artist, on the set of Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (released in 1936). The two soon embarked upon a partnership that was both romantic and professional.

Their relationship lasted more than a decade, during and after which time Maar struggled with depression; they parted ways in 1946, three years after Picasso began having an affair with a woman named Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children, son Claude and daughter Paloma. They went separate ways in 1953. (Gilot would later marry scientist Jonas Salk , the inventor of the polio vaccine.)

Picasso fathered four children: Paulo (Paul), Maya, Claude and Paloma Picasso. His daughter Paloma - featured in several of her father's paintings - would become a famous designer, crafting jewelry and other items for Tiffany & Co.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, in Mougins, France. He died of heart failure, reportedly while he and his wife Jacqueline were entertaining friends for dinner.

Considered radical in his work, Picasso continues to garner reverence for his technical mastery, visionary creativity and profound empathy. Together, these qualities have distinguished the "disquieting" Spaniard with the "piercing" eyes as a revolutionary artist.

For nearly 80 of his 91 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive, contributing significantly to — and paralleling the entire development of — modern art in the 20th century.

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Pablo Picasso
• Birth Year: 1881
• Birth date: October 25, 1881
• Birth City: Málaga
• Birth Country: Spain
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.
• World War II
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• La Llotja (Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi)
• Royal Academy of San Fernando
• School of Fine Arts (Barcelona, Spain)
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive.
• Pablo Picasso's full name was: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.
• Death Year: 1973
• Death date: April 8, 1973
• Death City: Mougins
• Death Country: France

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Pablo Picasso Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/pablo-picasso
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: August 28, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.
• If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
• When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.
• Everything you can imagine is real.
• Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
• For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping.
• When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
• Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?
• If you don't know what color to take, take black.
• Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
• It's not what the artist does that counts. But what he is.
• Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?
• Of course, you can paint pictures by matching up different parts of them so that they go nicely together, but they'll lack any kind of drama.
• It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It's a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live, but primarily so that he can realize his work.
• Nothing can be done without solitude.
• In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
• I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
• People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Pablo picasso (1881–1973).

Marble head from the figure of a woman

Woman in Green

Pablo Picasso

The Blind Man's Meal

At the Lapin Agile

Gertrude Stein

Bust of a Man

Woman in an Armchair

Standing Female Nude

Still Life with a Bottle of Rum

Man with a Hat and a Violin

Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table

Woman in White

Nude Standing by the Sea

Reading at a Table

The Dream and Lie of Franco II

Faun with Stars

Head of a Woman

James Voorhies Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey myriad intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism , Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso studied art briefly in Madrid in 1897, then in Barcelona in 1899, where he became closely associated with a group of modernist poets, writers, and artists who gathered at the café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), including the Catalan Carlos Casagemas (1880–1901).

Living intermittently in Paris and Spain until 1904, his work during these years suggests feelings of desolation and darkness inspired in part by the suicide of his friend Casagemas. Picasso’s paintings from late 1901 to about the middle of 1904, referred to as his Blue Period, depict themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair. In The Blind Man’s Meal ( 50.188 ) from 1903, he uses a dismal range of blues to sensitively render a lonely figure encumbered by his condition as he holds a crust of bread in one hand and awkwardly grasps for a pitcher with the other. The elongated, corkscrew bodies of El Greco (1540/41–1614) inspire the man’s distorted features.

Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and settled in the artist quarter Bateau-Lavoir, where he lived among bohemian poets and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Max Jacob (1876–1944). In At the Lapin Agile ( 1992.391 ) from 1905, Picasso directed his attention toward more pleasant themes such as carnival performers, harlequins, and clowns. In this painting, he used his own image for the harlequin figure and abandoned the daunting blues in favor of vivid hues, red for example, to celebrate the lives of circus performers (categorically labeled his Rose Period). In Paris, he found dedicated patrons in American siblings Gertrude (1874–1946) and Leo (1872–1947) Stein, whose Saturday-evening salons in their home at 27, rue des Fleurus was an incubator for modern artistic and intellectual thought. At the Steins he met other artists living and working in the city—generally referred to as the School of Paris —such as Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Painted in 1905–6, Gertrude Stein ( 47.106 ) records Picasso’s new fascination with pre-Roman Iberian sculpture and African and Oceanic art. Concentrating on intuition rather than strict observation, and unsatisfied with the features of Stein’s face, Picasso reworked her image into a masklike manifestation stimulated by primitivism. The influence of African and Oceanic art is explicit in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a painting that signals the nascent stages of Cubism. Here the figure arrangement recalls Cézanne’s compositions of bathers, while stylistically it is influenced by primitivism, evident by the angular planes and well-defined contours that create an overall sculptural solidity in the figures.

The basic principles of Analytic Cubism (1910–12), with its fragmentation of three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional picture plane, are embodied in Still Life with a Bottle of Rum ( 1999.363.63 ), painted in 1911. The techniques of Analytic Cubism were developed by Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque (1882–1963), who met in 1907. Picasso’s Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table ( 49.70.33 ) of 1912 is an early example of Synthetic Cubism (1912–14), a papier collé in which he pasted newsprint and colored paper onto canvas. Picasso and Braque also included tactile components such as cloth in their Synthetic Cubist works, and sometimes used trompe-l’oeil effects to create the illusion of real objects and textures, such as the grain of wood.

After World War I (1914–18), Picasso reverted to traditional styles, experimenting less with Cubism. In the early 1920s, he devised a unique variant of classicism using mythological images such as centaurs, minotaurs, nymphs, and fauns inspired by the classical world of Italy. Within this renewed expression, referred to as his Neoclassical Period, he created pictures dedicated to motherhood inspired by the birth of his son Paulo in 1921 (his first of four children by three women). Woman in White ( 53.140.4 ) of 1923 shows a woman clothed in a classic, toga-like, white dress resting calmly in a contemplative pose with tousled hair, eliciting a tender lyricism and calming spirit of maternity. Toward the end of the 1920s, Picasso drew on Surrealist imagery and techniques to make pictures of morphed and distorted figures. In Nude Standing by the Sea ( 1996.403.4 ) of 1929, Picasso’s figure recounts the classical pose of a standing nude with her arms upraised, but her body is swollen and monstrously rearranged.

By the early 1930s, Picasso had turned to harmonious colors and sinuous contours that evoke an overall biomorphic sensuality. He painted scenes of women with drooping heads and striking voluptuousness with a renewed sense of optimism and liberty, probably inspired by his affair with a young woman (one of Picasso’s numerous mistresses) named Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909–1977).  Reading at a Table ( 1996.403.1 ) from 1934 uses these expressive qualities of bold colors and gentle curves to portray Marie-Thérèse seated at an oversized table, emphasizing her youth and innocence.

Although still living in France in the 1930s, Picasso was deeply distraught over the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He reacted with a powerfully emotive series of pictures, such as  Dream and Lie of Franco ( 1986.1224.1[2] ), that culminated in the enormous mural Guernica (1937; Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid), painted in a grisaille palette of gray tones. This painting, Picasso’s contribution to the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, is a complex work of horrifying proportion with layers of antiwar symbolism protesting the fascist coup led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

From the late 1940s through the ’60s, Picasso’s creative energy never waned. Living in the south of France, he continued to paint, make ceramics, and experiment with printmaking. His international fame increased with large exhibitions in London, Venice, and Paris, as well as retrospectives in Tokyo in 1951, and Lyon, Rome, Milan, and São Paulo in 1953. A retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957 garnered a massive amount of attention, with over 100,000 visitors during the first month. This exhibition solidified Picasso’s prominence as museums and private collectors in America, Europe, and Japan vied to acquire his works.

In Faun with Stars ( 1970.305 ) from 1955, Picasso returned to the mythological themes explored in early pictures. Again, incorporating life experience into his painting, he evoked his infatuation with a new love, a young woman named Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986), who became his second wife in 1961 when the artist was seventy-nine years old. Picasso symbolized himself as a faun, calmly and coolly gazing with mature confidence and wisdom at a nymph who blows her instrument to the stars. The picture embraces his spellbound love for Jacqueline.

Even into his eighties and nineties, Picasso produced an enormous number of works and reaped the financial benefits of his success, amassing a personal fortune and a superb collection of his own art, as well as work by other artists. He died in 1973, leaving an artistic legacy that continues to resonate today throughout the world.

Voorhies, James. “Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/hd_pica.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Karmel, Pepe. Picasso and the Invention of Cubism . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso . New York: Abrams, 2003.

Olivier, Fernande. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier . Edited by Marilyn McCully. New York: Abrams, 2001.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso . 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1991–96.

Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. A Life of Picasso . 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1991.

Rose, Bernice B., and Bernard Ruiz Picasso, eds. Picasso: 200 Masterworks from 1898 to 1972 . Exhibition catalogue. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2002.

Rubin, William, ed. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective . Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980.

Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso . 33 vols. (catalogue raisonné). Paris: Cahiers d'Art, 1932–78.

Additional Essays by James Voorhies

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• Voorhies, James. “ Surrealism .” (October 2004)

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Pablo Picasso

Spanish Draftsman, Painter, Printmaker, and Sculptor

Summary of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the first half of the 20 th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism , alongside Georges Braque , he also invented collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism . He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. Finally, he was a famously charismatic personality; his many relationships with women not only filtered into his art but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.

Accomplishments

• It was a confluence of influences - from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau , to archaic and tribal art - that encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more structure and ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. These innovations would have far-reaching consequences for practically all of modern art, revolutionizing attitudes to the depiction of form in space.
• Picasso's immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come.
• Picasso had an eclectic attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different styles - sometimes even in the same artwork.
• His encounter with Surrealism, although never transforming his work entirely, encouraged not only the soft forms and tender eroticism of portraits of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, but also the starkly angular imagery of Guernica (1937), the century's most famous anti-war painting.
• Picasso was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), refer to a wealth of past precedents - even while overturning them. As he matured he became only more conscious of assuring his legacy, and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue with Old Masters such as Ingres , Velazquez , Goya , and Rembrandt .

The Life of Pablo Picasso

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." Said Picasso, and whether he was partnering with Braque on Cubism or spending time with the poets he admired, or the muses he loved and craved, he was finding new ways to see, and represent what he saw. His life is a virtual progression of modernism.

Important Art by Pablo Picasso

La Soupe is characteristic of the somber melancholy of Picasso's Blue Period, and it was produced at the same time as a series of other pictures devoted to themes of destitution, old age, and blindness. The picture conveys something of Picasso's concern with the miserable conditions he witnessed while coming of age in Spain, and it is no doubt influenced by the religious painting he grew up with, and perhaps specifically by El Greco. But the picture is also typical of the wider Symbolist movement of the period. In later years Picasso dismissed his Blue Period works as "nothing but sentiment"; critics have often agreed with him, even though many of these pictures are iconic, and of course, now unbelievably expensive.

Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an author, close friend, and even supporter of Picasso, and was integral to his growth as an artist. This portrait, in which Stein is wearing her favorite brown velvet coat, was made just a year before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and marks an important stage in his evolving style. In contrast to the flat appearance of the figures and objects in some of the Blue and Rose period works, the forms in this portrait seem almost sculpted, and indeed they were influenced by the artist's discovery of archaic Iberian sculpture. One can almost sense Picasso's increased interest in depicting a human face as a series of flat planes. Stein claimed that she sat for the artist some ninety times, and although that may be an exaggeration, Picasso certainly wrestled long and hard with painting her head. After approaching it in various ways, abandoning each attempt, one day he painted it out altogether, declaring "I can't see you any longer when I look," and soon abandoned the picture. It was only some time later, and without the model in front of him, that he completed the head.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

This painting was shocking even to Picasso's closest artist friends both for its content and its execution. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's studies of Iberian and tribal art is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. Picasso also went further with his spatial experiments by abandoning the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards, something Picasso borrowed in part from Paul Cézanne's brushwork. For instance, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously; it is difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it making it appear as if the two are both in the foreground. The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his Cubist collaborations with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, the work is considered proto or pre Cubism.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Still Life with Chair Caning

Still Life with Chair Caning is celebrated for being modern art's first collage. Picasso had affixed preexisting objects to his canvases before, but this picture marks the first time he did so with such playful and emphatic intent. The chair caning in the picture in fact comes from a piece of printed oilcloth - and not, as the title suggests, an actual piece of chair caning. But the rope around the canvas is very real, and serves to evoke the carved border of a café table. Furthermore, the viewer can imagine that the canvas is a glass table, and the chair caning is the actual seat of the chair that can be seen through the table. Hence the picture not only dramatically contrasts visual space as is typical of Picasso's experiments, it also confuses our sense of what it is that we are looking at.

Oil on canvas - The National Gallery, London

Maquette for Guitar

Picasso's experiments with collaged elements such as those in Still Life with Chair Caning encouraged him to reconsider traditional sculpture as well. Rather than a collage, however, Maquette for Guitar is an assemblage or three-dimensional collage. Picasso took pieces of cardboard, paper, string, and wire that he then folded, threaded, and glued together, making it the first sculpture assembled from disparate parts. The work is also innovative because it is not a solid material surrounded by a void, but instead fluidly integrates mass and its surrounding void. Picasso has translated the Cubist interest in multiple perspectives and geometric form into a three-dimensional medium, using non-traditional art materials that continue to challenge the distinction between high art and popular culture as he did in Ma Jolie (1911-12).

Paperboard, paper, thread, string, twine, and coated wire - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle

Picasso's Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle is typical of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he uses various means - painted dots, silhouettes, grains of sand - to allude to the depicted objects. This combination of painting and mixed media is an example of the way Picasso "synthesized" color and texture - synthesizing new wholes after mentally dissecting the objects at hand. During his Analytic Cubist phase Picasso had suppressed color, so as to concentrate more on the forms and volumes of the objects, and this rationale also no doubt guided his preference for still life throughout this phase. The life of the café certainly summed up modern Parisian life for the artists - it was where he spent a good deal of time talking with other artists - but the simple array of objects also ensured that questions of symbolism and allusion might be kept under control.

In this work, Picasso challenges the distinction between high art and popular culture, pushing his experiments in new directions. Building on the geometric forms of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Picasso moves further towards abstraction by reducing color and by increasing the illusion of low-relief sculpture. Most significantly, however, Picasso included painted words on the canvas. The words, "ma jolie" on the surface not only flatten the space further, but they also liken the painting to a poster because they are painted in a font reminiscent of one used in advertising. This is the first time that an artist so blatantly uses elements of popular culture in a work of high art. Further linking the work to pop culture and to the everyday, "Ma Jolie" was also the name of a popular tune at the time as well as Picasso's nickname for his girlfriend.

The Three Musicians

Picasso painted two version of this picture. The slightly smaller version hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but both are unusually large for Picasso's Cubist period, and he may have chosen to work on this grand scale because they mark the conclusion of his Synthetic Cubism, which had occupied him for nearly a decade. He painted it in the same summer as the very different, classical painting Three Women at the Spring . Some have interpreted the pictures as nostalgic remembrances of the artist's early days: Picasso sits in the center - as ever the Harlequin - and his old friends Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918, and Max Jacob, from whom he had become estranged, sit on either side. However, another argument links the pictures to Picasso's work for the Ballets Russes, and identifies the characters with more recent friends. Either way, the costumes of the figures certainly derive from traditions in Italian popular theatre.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Three Women at the Spring

Picasso made careful studies in preparation for this, his most ambitious treatment of what is an old classical subject. It makes reference to earlier pictures by Poussin and Ingres - titans of classical painting - but it also draws inspiration from Greek sculpture, and indeed the massive gravity of the figures is very sculptural. Critics have speculated that the subject appealed to him because of the recent birth of his first son, Paulo; the somber attitude of the figures may be explained by the contemporary preoccupation in France with mourning the dead of the First World War.

Large Nude in a Red Armchair

When Picasso's work came under the influence of the Surrealists in the late 1920s, his forms often took on melting, organic contours. This work was completed in May 1929, around the same time the Surrealists were preoccupied with the way in which ugly and disgusting imagery might provide a route into the unconscious. It was clearly intended to shock, and it may have been influenced by Salvador Dalí - and Joan Miro. It is thought that the picture represents the former dancer Olga Koklova, whose relationship with Picasso was failing around this time.

Oil on canvas - Musée National Picasso, Paris

This painting was Picasso's response to the bombing of the Basque town named Guernica on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Painted in one month - from May to June 1937 - it became the centerpiece of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair later that year. While it was a sensation at the fair, it was consequently banned from exhibition in Spain until military dictator Francisco Franco fell from power in 1975. Much time has been spent trying to decode the symbolism of the picture, and some believe that the dying horse in the center of the painting alludes to the people of Spain. The minotaur may allude to bull fighting, a favorite national past-time in Spain, though it also had complex personal significance for the artist. Although Guernica is undoubtedly modern art's most famous response to war, critics have been divided on its success as a painting.

Oil on canvas - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born into a creative family. His father was a painter, and he quickly showed signs of following the same path: his mother claimed that his first word was "piz," a shortened version of lapiz , or pencil, and his father was his first teacher. Picasso began formally studying art at the age of 11. Several paintings from his teenage years still exist, such as First Communion (1895), which is typical in its conventional, if accomplished, academic style. His father groomed the young prodigy to be a great artist by getting Picasso the best education the family could afford and visiting Madrid to see works by Spanish Old Masters. And when the family moved to Barcelona so his father could take up a new post, Picasso continued his art education.

Early Training

It was in Barcelona that Picasso first matured as a painter. He frequented the Els Quatre Gats, a café popular with bohemians, anarchists, and modernists. And he came to be familiar with Art Nouveau and Symbolism , and artists such as Edvard Munch and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec . It was here that he met Jaime Sabartes, who would go on to be his fiercely loyal secretary in later years. This was his introduction to a cultural avant-garde , in which young artists were encouraged to express themselves.

During the years from 1900 to 1904, Picasso traveled frequently, spending time in Madrid and Paris, in addition to spells in Barcelona. Although he began making sculpture during this time, critics characterize this time as his Blue Period, after the blue/grey palette that dominated his paintings. The mood of the work was also insistently melancholic. One might see the beginnings of this in the artist's sadness over the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend he had met in Barcelona, though the subjects of much of the Blue Period work were drawn from the beggars and prostitutes he encountered in city streets. The Old Guitarist (1903) is a typical example of both the subject matter and the style of this phase.

In 1904, Picasso's palette began to brighten, and for a year or more he painted in a style that has been characterized as his Rose Period. He focused on performers and circus figures, switching his palette to various shades of more uplifting reds and pinks. And around 1906, soon after he had met artist Georges Braque , his palette darkened, his forms became heavier and more solid in aspect, and he began to find his way towards Cubism .

Mature Period

In the past critics dated the beginnings of Cubism to his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Although that work is now seen as transitional (lacking the radical distortions of his later experiments), it was clearly crucial in his development since it was heavily influenced by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art. It is said to have inspired Braque to paint his own first series of Cubist paintings, and in subsequent years the two would mount one of the most remarkable collaborations in modern painting, sometimes eagerly learning from each other, at other times trying to outdo one another in their fast-paced and competitive race to innovate. They visited each other daily during their formulation of this radical technique, and Picasso described himself and Braque as "two mountaineers, roped together." In their shared vision, multiple perspectives on an object are depicted simultaneously by being fragmented and rearranged in splintered configurations. Form and space became the most crucial elements, and so both artists restricted their palettes to earth tones, in stark contrast with the bright colors used by the Fauves that had preceded them. Picasso would always have an artist or a group he collaborated with, but as Braque biographer Alex Danchev wrote: Picasso's "Braque period" was "the most concentrated and fruitful of his whole career."

Picasso rejected the label "Cubism," especially when critics began to differentiate between the two key approaches he was said to pursue - Analytic and Synthetic . He saw his body of work as a continuum. But it is beyond doubt that there was a change in his work around 1912. He became less concerned with representing the placement of objects in space than in using shapes and motifs as signs to playfully allude to their presence. He developed the technique of collage , and from Braque he learned the related method of papiers colles , which used cutout pieces of paper in addition to fragments of existing materials. This phase has since come to be known as the "Synthetic" phase of Cubism, due to its reliance on various allusions to an object in order to create the description of it. This approach opened up the possibilities of more decorative and playful compositions, and its versatility encouraged Picasso to continue to utilize it well in the 1920s.

But the artist's dawning interest in ballet also sent his work in new directions around 1916. This was in part prompted by meeting the poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau . Through him he met Sergei Diaghilev , and went on to produce numerous set designs for the Ballets Russes.

For some years Picasso had occasionally toyed with classical imagery, and he began to give this free rein in the early 1920s. His figures became heavier and more massive, and he often imagined them against backgrounds of a Mediterranean Golden Age. They have long been associated with the wider conservative trends of Europe's so-called rappel a l'ordre , (return to order), a period of art now known as Interwar Classicism .

His encounter with Surrealism in the mid 1920s again prompted a change of direction. His work became more expressive, and often violent or erotic. This phase in his work can also be correlated with the period in his personal life when his marriage to dancer Olga Khokhlova began to break down and he began a new relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. Indeed, critics have often noted how changes in style in Picasso's work often go hand in hand with changes in his romantic relationships; his partnership with Khokhlova spanned the years of his interest in dance and, later, his time with Jacqueline Roque is associated with his late phase in which he became preoccupied with his legacy alongside the Old Masters. Picasso frequently painted the women he was in love with, and, as a result, his tumultuous personal life is well represented on canvas. He was known to have kept many mistresses, most famously Eva Gouel, Dora Maar , and Françoise Gilot. He married twice, and had four children, Claude, Paloma, Maia, and Paulo.

In the late 1920s he began a collaboration with the sculptor Julio González . This was his most significant creative partnership since he had worked alongside Braque, and it culminated in welded metal sculptures, which were subsequently highly influential.

As the 1930s wore on, political concerns began to cloud Picasso's view, and these would continue to preoccupy him for some time. His disgust at the bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War prompted him to create the painting Guernica , in 1937. During World War II he stayed in Paris, and the German authorities left him sufficiently unmolested to allow him to continue his work. However, the war did have a huge impact on Picasso, with his Paris painting collection confiscated by Nazis and some of his closest Jewish friends killed. Picasso made works commemorating them - sculptures employing hard, cold materials such as metal, and a particularly violent follow up to Guernica , entitled The Charnel House (1945). Following the war he was also closely involved with the Communist Party, and several major pictures from this period, such as War in Korea (1951), make that new allegiance clear.

Late Years and Death

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Picasso worked on his own versions of canonical masterpieces by artists such as Nicolas Poussin , Diego Velázquez , and El Greco . In the later years of his life, Picasso sought solace from his celebrity, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961. His later paintings were heavily portrait-based and their palettes nearly garish in hue. Critics have generally considered them inferior to his earlier work, though in recent years they have been more enthusiastically received. He also created many ceramic and bronze sculptures during this later period. He died of a heart attack in the South of France in 1973.

The Legacy of Pablo Picasso

Picasso's influence was profound and far-reaching, and remarkably, many periods of his life were influential in their own right. His early Symbolist pieces remain iconic, while innovations in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. Even after the war, even though the energy in avant-garde art shifted to New York, Picasso remained a titanic figure, and one who could never be ignored. Indeed, even though the Abstract Expressionists could be said to have superseded aspects of Cubism (even while being strongly influenced by him), The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been called "the house that Pablo built," because it has so widely exhibited the artist's work. MoMA's opening exhibition in 1930 included fifteen paintings by Picasso. He was also a part of Alfred Barr's highly influential survey shows Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936-37). Although his influence undoubtedly waned in the 1960s, he had by that time become a pop icon, and the public's fascination with his life story continue to fuel interest in his work.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Pablo Picasso

• Pablo Picasso: Lives and Loves The Art Story Blog: The many women and muses of Picasso
• Picasso: Works Entering the Public Domain in 2019 Copyrights expire in the United States for a number of Picasso artworks
• Defining Modern Art Take a look at the big picture of modern art, and Picasso's role in it
• Timeline of Most Important Modern Art Picasso's 3 important works are a part of the overall history of Modern Art
• A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906 By John Richardson
• A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 By John Richardson
• A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 By John Richardson
• Picasso (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) By Gertrude Stein
• Life with Picasso Our Pick By Françoise Gilot
• Picasso & Lump: A Dachshund's Odyssey By David Douglas Duncan, Paloma Picasso Thevenet
• Picasso: 200 Masterpieces from 1898 to 1972 Our Pick By Pablo Picasso, Bernard Picasso, Bernice Rose
• Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973: Genius of the Century By Walther F. Ingo
• Picasso and the war years, 1937-1945 (1999) Guggenheim Exhibition Catalogue / By Steven A. Nash, Robert Rosenblum, Brigitte Baer
• Picasso and American Art By Michael FitzGerald, Julia May Boddewyn
• Picasso Line Drawings and Prints By Pablo Picasso
• Picasso Administration Official Website
• Picasso Museum Our Pick Museum in Madrid, Spain
• Page about the painting Guernica (1937)
• Page about the painting The Tragedy (1903) Analysis of painting beneath this painting. By National Gallery of Art
• The Artist Pablo Picasso By Robert Hughes / Time Magazine / June 8, 1998
• Artists on Picasso: Then and Now July 19, 2007
• Simon Schama's Power of Art series, on Picasso's Guernica
• Picasso: a documentary by Luciano Emmer
• Le Mystere Picasso: a documentary by Henri-Georges Clouzot
• Visit to Picasso: A Documentary by Paul Haesaert Our Pick
• Surviving Picasso (1996) Story of Picasso's lover Françoise Gilot
• Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies 2008 Documentary about the beginnings of Cubism
• David Bowie Music Video

Similar Art

Vision After the Sermon (Jacob's Fight with the Angel) (1888)

Table, Napkin, and Fruit (A Corner of the Table) (1895-1900)

The Woman with a Hat (1905)

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Pablo Picasso

In the Studio

Modern art and st ives, prints and drawings rooms, artist biography, wikipedia entry.

School of Paris painter, sculptor , etcher , lithographer , ceramist and designer, who has had enormous influence on 20th century art and worked in an unprecedented variety of styles. Born at Malaga, Spain, son of an art teacher. His family moved to Barcelona, where he entered the School of Fine Arts 1895; then entered Madrid Academy 1897. Early showed great precocity. First visited Paris in autumn 1900, returned in 1901 when he had his first Paris one-man exhibition at the Galerie Vollard. Blue Period paintings of beggars and sad-faced women. Settled in Paris 1904. In 1905 painted some pictures of circus folk and embarked on his Rose Period. 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' 1906-7 marked the beginning of a more revolutionary manner, influenced by Cezanne and Negro art. Met Braque in 1907 and with his collaboration created Cubism . Designed sets and costumes for Parade and other Diaghilev ballets 1917-24. Made some neo-classic figure paintings 1920-4, parallel to later Cubism. Started to make more violently expressive and metamorphic works in 1925, and in the following years frequently exhibited with the Surrealists . Important series of wrought- iron constructions and modelled sculptures 1928-34, illustrations for Ovid's Les Métamorphoses , Buffon's Histoire Naturelle etc. Awarded First Prize at the 1930 Pittsburgh International. His painting 'Guernica' 1937 was inspired by the destruction by bombing of the Spanish town of that name. Continued to live in Paris throughout the Occupation. From 1946 lived mainly in the South of France at Antibes, Vallauris, Cannes, and from 1958 near Aix-en-Provence, where he maintained a prolific output of paintings, sculptures, etchings, lithographs and ceramics. Died at Mougins, near Cannes.

Published in: Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists , Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.591-2

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.

Picasso's output, especially in his early career, is often periodized. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License . Spotted a problem? Let us know .

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle

Bust of a woman, seated woman in a chemise, girl in a chemise, horse with a youth in blue, seated nude, artist as subject, thanx picasso, the defects of its qualities, picasso’s meninas, faun revealing a sleeping woman (jupiter and antiope, after rembrandt), head of a young boy, etching: 11, 28 february 1970 3, 16, 30 march 1970 (l.13), etching: 19 february 1970 (l.16), i could lend you something, but i would not be doing you any favours, film and audio.

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Biography Online

Biography Pablo Picasso

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

– Pablo Picasso

Short bio of Pablo Picasso

“When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

—- Pablo Picasso

His early artistic career went through various states. One of the first stages was known as the ‘Blue Period.’ In his late-teens his paintings were dominated by different shades of dark blue; they were also often melancholic. This included a famous self-portrait where Picasso looked much older than his 20 years.

Pablo_Picasso 1905 – ‘At the Lapin Agile;

During 1904-06, Picasso entered a phase known as ‘The Rose Period’ Losing the glumness of his previous ‘Blue Period’, Picasso painted circus clowns, harlequins and people from the circus. The more cheerful and optimistic tone helped to attract an increasing number of patrons and people interested in his work. In particular, the American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, and the art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.  Kahnweiler was influential in helping to put Picasso on a secure financial footing. Picasso later remarked; “What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?”

In 1907, Picasso continued his artistic experiments and took inspiration from African art. This led to an early form of cubism and also one of his most controversial paintings – ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ – it is a picture depicting five prostitutes in a brothel. It is an eye-catching and an original exploration of modernism in art, but when displayed in his studio the reaction from art critics was strongly negative.

‘Nature morte au compotier’ – 1914-15, ‘crystal cubism.’

In the years before the First World War, Picasso – along with artists such as Georges Braque – continued to develop a new form of painting known as ‘cubism.’ Cubism involved capturing the essence of the subject on the canvas but exaggerating certain features. The colours were invariably dull – greys, brown and neutrals.

In 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon with fellow artists. His French artist friends were called up to the army, but he was able to continue painting during the war. However, the German-born Kahnweiler was exiled from France and Picasso was left without a dealer.

In 1918, Picasso married ballerina Olga Khokhlova. Shortly after he began a fruitful relationship with the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg became good friends with Picasso and helped the couple settle in Paris, giving Picasso a new artistic social circle. Paris was considered an artistic hotspot of the ‘Roaring Twenties,’ attracting many innovative artists. Picasso and his wife Khokholva had a tempestuous relationship. Picasso’s bohemian nature clashed with the social graces of Khokhlova. They remained married until 1955, but Picasso had several affairs and mistresses.

In the 1920s and 30s, Picasso concentrated on more classical works of art. He became interested in depicting the human form in the style of neo-classical. To some extent, he was influenced by artists such as Renoir and Ingres, although he always retained a unique and individual expression.

Picasso had an instinctive and natural compassion for those exposed to suffering, especially if it was as a result of injustice. His natural sympathy and desire for equality led him to join the French Communist party. During the Spanish Civil War, he supported the Republicans and nursed an intense dislike of Franco and what he did to Spain.

Pablo Picasso and Guernica

One of Picasso’s most famous paintings was his mural of the Guernica bombing (1937). The Guernica bombing was carried out by Italian and German planes and involved the carpet bombing of civil areas. The bombing of Guernica was a significant development in modern warfare as it showed a  new capacity for extending the horrors of warfare to the civilian population. The bombing became international news through the English journalist George Steer. Picasso’s painting helped to immortalise the tragedy as a key event in the Twentieth Century. (See: Events that changed the world )

Picasso was so enraged with Franco that he never allowed the painting to go to Spain during Franco’s lifetime. It eventually reached Spain in 1981.

Picasso was well aware of a political dimension to art.

“What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

— Pablo Picasso

The Dove of Peace by Picasso

Another key painting of Picasso was his simple bird drawing a symbol of peace. Picasso donated it the Soviet-backed World Peace Congress of 1949. It was telling of a new phase in Picasso’s art – the power of simplicity. Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party until his death.

Abundant in artistic inspiration, Picasso was remarkably prolific. His total artistic work numbered close to 50,000. This included 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, and roughly 12,000. He died at the age of 91.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Pablo Picasso”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , 2/11/2007. Last updated 17th March 2017.

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Pablo Picasso Biography

Born: October 25, 1881 Malaga, Spain Died: April 8, 1973 Mougins, France Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso was one of the most productive and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism (an artistic style where recognizable objects are fragmented to show all sides of an object at the same time), he established the basis for abstract art (art having little or no pictorial representation).

Early years

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was the eldest and only son with two younger sisters, Lola and Concepción. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Ruiz Picasso (the artist used her surname from about 1901 on). It is rumored that Picasso learned to draw before he could speak. As a child, his father frequently took him to bullfights, and one of his earlier paintings was a scene from a bullfight.

In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of fourteen, Picasso began studying at the School of Fine Art. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.

When the family moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1896, Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. A year later he was admitted as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. He demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.

Picasso soon found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he returned to Barcelona, where he began to study historical and contemporary art on his own. At that time Barcelona was the most vital cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets, painters, and writers who gathered at the famous café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). Between 1900 and 1903 Picasso stayed alternately in Paris, France, and Barcelona. He had his first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1901.

Paris at the turn of the twentieth century

At the turn of the twentieth century Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it was the birthplace of the impressionists—painters who depicted the appearance of objects by means of dabs or strokes of unmixed colors in order to create the look of actual reflected light. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction.

Picasso set up a permanent studio in Paris in 1904. His studio soon became a gathering place for the city's most modern artists, writers, and patrons.

Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which continued throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary (modern) painting. In doing so, his own work changed with extraordinary quickness.

Blue and pink periods

The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period. Nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, melancholy, and introspective (concentrating on their own thoughts) figures. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).

In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style took a new direction. In these paintings the color became more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with reddish and pink tones dominating the works. Thus this period was called his Pink Period. The most celebrated example of this phase is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been influenced by the late paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

The face in Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre, in Paris, in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

Picasso and cubism

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally regarded as the first cubist painting. The faces of the figures are seen from both front and profile positions at the same time. Between 1907 and 1911 Picasso continued to break apart the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic (using one color) planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract. Representation gradually vanished from his painting, until it became an end in itself—for the first time in the history of Western art.

The growth of this process is evident in all of Picasso's work between 1907 and 1911. Some of the most outstanding pictorial examples of the development are Fruit Dish (1909), Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), and Ma Jolie, also known as Woman with a Guitar (1911–12).

Collages and further development

About 1911 Picasso and Georges Braque (1882–1963) began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus creating an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is Still Life with Chair Caning (1911–1912).

After Picasso experimented with the new medium of collage, he returned more intensively to painting. In his Three Musicians (1921), the planes became broader, more simplified, and more colorful. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.

Additional achievements

Picasso also created sculpture and prints throughout his long career, and made numerous important contributions to both media. He periodically worked in ceramics, and designed sets, curtains, and interiors for the theater.

In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About 1915, and again in the early 1920s, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical style. One of the most famous of these works is the Woman in White (1923). Painted just two years after the Three Musicians, the quiet and unobtrusive (not calling attention to itself) elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself pictorially.

One of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica (1937). This work had been commissioned for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair. It depicts the destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39; the military revolt against the Spanish government). The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the massacre (a mass killing) which inspired it, are reflected in the fact that he completed the work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven weeks.

Guernica is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white, and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering, and brutality that has few parallels. Picasso applied the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness.

Picasso's politics

Picasso also declared publicly in 1947 that he was a Communist (someone who believes the national government should control all businesses and the distribution of goods). When he was asked why he was a Communist, he stated, "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists." But sometimes the Communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a Communist. A 1953 portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) caused an uproar in the Communist Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works.

Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975), he gave eight hundred to nine hundred of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. To display these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.

Picasso was married twice, first to dancer Olga Khoklova and then to Jacqueline Roque. He had four children. He was planning an exhibit of over two hundred of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France when he died at his thirty-five-room hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973.

The discovery of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of twentieth-century art. Throughout his life he exhibited a remarkable genius for sculpture, graphics, and ceramics, as well as painting. His is one of the most celebrated artists of the modern period.

For More Information

Cowling, Elizabeth. Interpreting Matisse, Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. Edited by Molly Stevens and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Olivier, Fernande. Picasso and His Friends. New York: Appleton-Century, 1965.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, 1991.

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Pablo Picasso

By jake rossen | dec 5, 2019.

ARTISTS (1881–1973); MÁLAGA, SPAIN

Few artists have enjoyed the stature and legacy afforded to Pablo Picasso, the famed painter who ushered in the art style known as Cubism and whose name became synonymous with masterpieces of artistic expression. Keep reading for more on the acclaimed artist’s life and artwork.

1. Pablo Picasso's art included more than just paint.

Over his storied career and through thousands of artworks, Picasso used far more than paint and a brush. Among the tools and styles involved in the creation of his art, including sculptures, were:

• Sea stones.
• Toy cars, used in the Baboon and Young sculpture in 1951.
• A bicycle seat and handlebars, used to create his Bull’s Head sculpture in 1942.
• Linocuts, a type of printmaking using a linoleum block.
• Forks, used for the feet of a bird in his Bird sculpture in 1958.

2. Pablo Picasso preferred artwork to schoolwork.

Born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881, Picasso’s destiny seemed prewritten. His father was José Ruiz y Blasco, an art instructor, and from an early age, Picasso was weaned on the techniques of the trade. By the time he was 13, he was said to have exceeded his own father’s artistic abilities and began ignoring his formal education so he could sketch in his notebook.

Even the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where Picasso wound up at age 14, was not enough to hold his interest. He took to the streets, sketching landscapes. At the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, he again skipped class to wander around and absorb real life. His experimental urges and dismissal of conventional teachings would come to define his work.

3. Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period” paintings, including The Old Guitarist , were the result of personal tragedy.

Though he experimented with different art styles throughout his career, it’s Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period” that stands out. Art historians dubbed this stretch of time from 1901 to 1904 to mark a noticeable shift in Picasso’s artwork to bleak scenes of private struggles, including poverty. The mood of each piece was accentuated by the use of blues and greens, and it's thought that the change in tone was the result of the death of a close friend, Carlos Casagemas. Of these, The Old Guitarist is one of his best-known, though this period also produced Blue Nude and La Vie . This was followed by his "Rose Period" from 1904 to 1906, which seemed to release Picasso from his depression and resulted in more colorful works like Family of Saltimbanques and Acrobat and Young Harlequin .

4. Pablo Picasso’s most famous accomplishment was helping introduce Cubism to the world.

In 1905, Picasso crossed paths with French painter Georges Braque, who had been busy experimenting with polychromatic and stylized landscape paintings. Together, the two explored what came to be known as Cubism, or the practice of applying geometric shapes—not just cubes—to subjects to reinforce the two-dimensional nature of the art. The style has its roots in traditional African sculptures (like tribal masks ) and post-Impressionalists like Cézanne . Picasso’s 1907 portrait of five prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , is considered the first Cubist painting.

5. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica might be his most celebrated work.

Picasso was living in Paris in 1937 when he was struck with inspiration, though not one he would ever have welcomed. That spring, German and Italian bombers leveled the city of Guernica in Spain as part of that country’s civil war. Using a massive canvas that was more mural than painting, Picasso was compelled to create Guernica , which used strong imagery like a bull and a grieving mother to depict the consequences of war. Originally on display in the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, the artwork wound up in the United States and was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It’s now able to be viewed in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

6. Pablo Picasso painted self-portraits for over 70 years.

One way of charting Picasso’s interests and skills in his artistic approach is to examine his self-portraits. Composed from the age of 15 to age 90, they reflect his ever-changing styles. He sketched many of them early on before shifting to his Blue Period style of greens and blues. Self-portraits in the styles of Cubism and Neo-Classicism followed.

7. Pablo Picasso had four children, and they inherited his works.

Picasso was not one to settle down. He had four children with three different women. With ballerina Olga Khokhlova, he had a son, Paulo, born in 1917. With model Marie-Thérèse Walter, he had daughter Maya, born in 1935. With painter Françoise Gilot, he had Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949. Paulo died in 1975, leaving three remaining children and Paulo’s two offspring as heirs. The Paris-based Picasso Administration manages their interests and helps to authenticate his works and debunk forgeries.

8. Pablo Picasso’s death preceded one of his most creative periods.

It’s believed that Picasso created more works in the last four years of his life than at any other period of time, embracing more ambitious and abstract approaches and even painting The Young Painter in 1971, a rendition of Picasso decades younger. He died on April 8, 1973 at age 91 of heart failure in Mougins, France.

9. Pablo Picasso's Full Name Is 23 Words Long.

Pablo Picasso's full name is actually Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. The flood of names is based on those of various saints and relatives, with the "Picasso" part coming from his mother, María Picasso y López.

Famous Pablo Picasso Quotes:

• “It takes a long time to become young.”
• “The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
• “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
• “Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”

Pablo Picasso

Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Engraver and Ceramist

• Art History
• Architecture

Pablo Picasso, also known as Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, was singular in the art world. Not only did he manage to become universally famous in his own lifetime, he was the first artist to successfully use mass media to further his name (and business empire). He also inspired or, in the notable case of Cubism, invented, nearly every art movement in the twentieth century.

Movement, Style, School or Period:

Several, but best known for (co-)inventing Cubism

Date and Place of Birth

October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain

Picasso's father, fortuitously, was an art teacher who quickly realized he had a boy genius on his hands and (almost as quickly) taught his son everything he knew. At the tender age of 14, Picasso passed the entrance exam to the Barcelona School of Fine Arts - in just one day. By the early 1900s, Picasso had moved to Paris, the "capital of the arts." There he found friends in Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and George Braque, and a burgeoning reputation as a painter of note.

Body of Work

Before, and shortly after, moving to Paris, Picasso's painting was in its "Blue Period" (1900-1904), which eventually gave way to his "Rose Period" (1905-1906). It wasn't until 1907, though, that Picasso really raised a commotion in the art world. His painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marked the beginning of Cubism .

Having caused such a stir, Picasso spent the next 15 years seeing what, exactly, could be done with Cubism (such as putting paper and bits of string in a painting, thus inventing the collage ). The Three Musicians (1921), pretty much summed up Cubism for Picasso.

For the rest of his days, no one style could maintain a hold on Picasso. In fact, he was known to use two or more different styles, side by side, within a single painting. One notable exception is his surrealistic painting Guernica (1937), arguably one of the greatest pieces of social protest ever created.

Picasso lived long and, indeed, prospered. He grew fabulously wealthy from his phenomenal output (including erotically themed ceramics), took up with younger and younger women, entertained the world with his outspoken remarks, and painted almost right up until he died at the age of 91.

Date and Place of Death

April 8, 1973, Mougins, France

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

• Defining Synthetic Cubism
• Biography of Eva Gouel, Muse and Mistress of Pablo Picasso
• Biography of Georges Braque, Pioneer Cubist Painter
• Juan Gris, Spanish Cubist Painter
• Cubism in Art History
• What Is Analytic Cubism in Art?
• Biography of Paul Cezanne, French Post-Impressionist
• Picasso's Women: Wives, Lovers, and Muses
• 10 Topic Ideas for Art History Papers
• The Birth of Synthetic Cubism: Picasso's Guitars
• Stuart Davis, American Modernist Painter
• Biography of Salvador Dalí, Surrealist Artist
• "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" by Steve Martin
• Germaine Gargallo, Picasso's Lover
• Surrealism, the Amazing Art of Dreams
• The Life and Work of Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Art Pioneer

Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist

Pablo Picasso is perhaps the most influential figure in the history of 20th-century art. The varied range of Pablo Picasso’s artworks were not the result of drastic transformations in his style over his career but were instead based on his commitment to objectively evaluate the form and method best suited to accomplish his desired impact for each art piece. Picasso’s artworks were unquestionably destined to be interwoven into the tapestry of mankind as some of the finest artworks of all time.

Table of Contents

• 1 The Life and Art of Pablo Picasso
• 2.1 Early Life
• 2.2 Early Training
• 2.3 Mature Period
• 2.4 Late Years and Death
• 3.1 The Blue Period (1901-1904)
• 3.2 The Rose Period (1904-1906)
• 3.3 African Influences (1907-1909)
• 3.4 Cubism (1909-1912)
• 3.5 Neoclassicism (late 1910s-early 1920s) and Surrealism (mid-1920s)
• 4.1 The Soup (1903)
• 4.2 Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905)
• 4.3 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
• 4.4 Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)
• 4.5 Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (1914)
• 4.6 Ma Jolie (1912)
• 4.7 The Three Musicians (1921)
• 4.8 Three Women at the Spring (1921)
• 4.9 Guernica (1937)
• 5.1 Life with Picasso (2019) by Francois Gilot
• 5.2 Picasso: Painting the Blue Period (2021) by Kenneth Brummel
• 6.1 When Was Picasso Born and When Did Picasso Die?
• 6.2 Who Was Pablo Picasso?

The Life and Art of Pablo Picasso

Before reaching the age of 50, this famous artist had established himself as the most renowned figure in contemporary art , with the most distinctive aesthetic and sense for artistic production. Before Picasso, no other creator had made such an influence on the art community or had such a significant reputation among admirers as well as critics.

During his lengthy career, Picasso’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures amounted to around 20,000 pieces, including other objects such as costuming and theatrical sets.

He is globally considered to be one of the 20th century’s most important and acclaimed painters . As an artistic pioneer, he is credited with being a founding member of the Cubist movement with Georges Braque. Cubism was a cultural movement that forever altered the landscape of European sculpture and painting, as well as architectural styles, music, and writing.

Cubist themes and artifacts are disassembled and reassembled in an abstract fashion.

When Picasso and Braque were creating the groundwork for Cubism in France between 1910 and 1920, its influence was so far-reaching that it inspired offshoots such as Dada, Futurism , and Constructivism in other nations. Picasso is also recognized for the invention of built sculpture and the co-invention of the collage art form. He is also considered among three 20th-century painters who are acknowledged for developing the principles of Plastic arts.

By actively manipulating substances that had not before been cut or sculpted, this innovative art form drove civilization toward social improvements in paintings, sculpting, printing, and pottery. These substances were not simply plastic; they could be shaped in some fashion, generally in three dimensions. Plaster, metals, and wood were employed by artists to produce groundbreaking sculptural artworks that the public had never experienced before.

But when was Picasso born and when did Picasso die? Let us first take a look at Pablo Picasso’s biography before we go any further into his style and examples of famous Picasso paintings .

Pablo Picasso’s Biography

Picasso’s propensity to create works in a wide range of genres earned him a high level of recognition throughout his lifetime. His importance as an artist and an influence on other painters has only risen since his death in 1973. To understand how he rose to fame, let us take a look at his childhood, education, and art periods .

Picasso was born to Don and Maria Picasso in Malaga, Spain. His father, an artist and art instructor, was awestruck by the young boy’s painting talent from a very early age. Picasso began academic training from his father at the age of seven.

Ruiz felt that instruction consisted of reproducing masterpieces and sketching the human figure from live subjects as well as plaster casts due to his conventional academic schooling.

When Picasso was ten years of age, his family relocated to A Coruna, where the School of Fine Arts employed his father as a lecturer. They stayed for four years, during which time Ruiz thought his son had overtaken him as a painter at the age of 13 and resolved to stop painting. Though Ruiz’s still created paintings for many years to follow, he was undoubtedly awed by his son’s inherent talent and skill. Pablo Picasso’s family was shocked when his little sister passed away in 1895 from diphtheria.

Early Training

They relocate to Barcelona, where Pablo Picasso’s father started working at the School of Fine Arts. He convinced administrators to allow his son to take an admission test for an expert class, and Picasso was enrolled at the age of 13 years old. When he was 16 years of age, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Spain’s most prestigious art school. Picasso despised the formal lessons and dropped out of his lessons soon after arriving. He spent his days within Madrid’s Prado, which had works by El Greco and Goya.

Picasso’s corpus of work is extensive and extends from his early childhood years until his death, offering a more thorough record of his progress than possibly any other artist.

Studying the archives of his initial studies, there is reported to be a transition when the childlike aspect of his drawings faded, indicating the formal start of his profession. That year is claimed to be 1894 when young Pablo Picasso Would have been just 13 years of age. He produced the Portrait of Aunt Pepa at the age of 14, a remarkable picture that has been considered to be one of the greatest portraits in the history of Spain. Picasso also produced his award-winning Science and Charity at the age of 16. His realism method, which had been instilled in him by his father and early education, expanded with his exposure to symbolist ideas.

This inspired Picasso to create his own interpretation of modernity and to undertake his first journey to Paris.

Picasso learned French from a Parisian acquaintance, poet Max Jacob. They lived in an apartment where they learned what it was like to be a “struggling artist.” They were chilly and poor, and they had to burn their own works to keep the flat warm. Despite the fact that he started developing sculpture throughout this phase, critics refer to it as his Blue Period, named after the blue color palette that characterized his canvases.

The work’s tone was likewise unmistakably melancholy.

The artist’s anguish at the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend he met in Barcelona, may be seen as the origins of this, while the themes of most of the Blue Period works were derived from the homeless and hookers he met on city streets . The Old Guitarist (1903) is an excellent illustration of this period’s subject material and aesthetic. Pablo Picasso’s colors started to lighten in 1904, and he worked in a manner known as his Rose Period for a year or longer. He concentrated on entertainers and circus people, changing his palette to more cheerful pinks and reds.

And, shortly after meeting artist Georges Braque in 1906, his palette deepened, his figures got denser and more concrete in appearance, and he started to move towards Cubism.

Mature Period

Previously, commentators traced the origins of Cubism to his early work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Although that piece is today regarded as intermediate (it lacks the dramatic aberrations of his later efforts), it was definitely pivotal in his growth due to its heavy influence from African sculptures and old Iberian artwork.

It is said to have motivated Braque to create his own first series of artworks, and in the years that followed, the two would embark on one of the most extraordinary collaborative efforts in contemporary art, occasionally excitedly learning from one another, occasionally attempting to surpass one another in their fast-paced and aggressive contest to advance.

During the development of this radical approach, Braque and Picasso met on a regular basis, and Picasso characterized himself and Braque as “two climbers bound together.” Multiple viewpoints on an item are shown concurrently in their common vision by being split and reorganized in splintered forms. Form and space were the most important aspects, and as a result, both painters limited their palettes to neutral tones, in stark contradiction to the brilliant colors employed by the Fauves before them.

Picasso would always cooperate with an individual or a collective, but as Braque historian Alex Danchev put it, Picasso’s “Braque phase” was “the most intense and productive of his entire career.”

Picasso hated the title “Cubism”, particularly as critics began to distinguish between the two main methods he was claimed to follow – Synthetic and Analytical. He considered his oeuvre as a whole. However, there is little question that his work changed after 1912. He became less preoccupied with depicting the arrangement of items in space and more interested in employing forms and motifs as cues to hint at their existence in a whimsical manner.

He invented the collage method, and from Braque, he learned the related papiers colles method, which included cutout sheets of paper in combination with parts of preexisting source materials. Due to its dependence on different references to an item in order to build the description of it, this phase has later come to be regarded as the “Synthetic” phase of Cubism.

Picasso used this approach to produce more decorative and humorous arrangements, and its versatility inspired him to continue using it far into the 1920s.

However, the artist’s growing interest in dance shifted his works to new areas about 1916. Meeting the writer, painter, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau motivated this in part. Through Cocteau, he managed to meet Sergei Diaghilev and went on to design several sets for the Ballets Russes. Picasso had been experimenting with classical themes for some years before allowing its full run in the early 1920s. His characters got a lot bigger and more imposing, and he often depicted them against the context of a Mediterranean Golden Age.

They have long been connected with the broader conservative tendencies of Europe’s so-called rappel a l’ordre , a period of art now defined as Interwar Classicism. In the mid-1920s, he was influenced by Surrealism, which caused him to rethink his career path. His art evolved into something more expressive, frequently aggressive or provocative. This moment in his career corresponds to the time in his private affairs when his relationship with ballerina Olga Khokhlova began to fall apart and he started a new affair with Marie-Therese Walter.

Undoubtedly, critics have frequently noted how modifications in Pablo Picasso’s paintings style often coincide with shifts in his intimate relationships; his relationship with Khokhlova stretched the years of his involvement in dance, and his subsequent moment with Jacqueline Roque is affiliated with his late stage, in which he had become fixated with his place in history alongside the Old Masters. In the late 1920s, he started working with Julio González, the sculptor.

This was his most major creative collaboration since working with Braque, and it resulted in welded metal artworks that were afterward immensely influential.

Political issues started to distort Picasso’s vision as the 1930s progressed, and continued to do so for some time. In 1937, he was inspired by the bombardment of people in the Basque village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War to produce the picture Guernica. During World War II, he resided in Paris, and the German officials left him alone long enough for him to resume his work.

Nevertheless, the war had a significant influence on Picasso, since the Nazis took his Paris art collection and murdered some of his dearest Jewish friends.

Picasso created works in their honor, including sculptures made of harsh, rigid materials like metal in The Charnel House , a particularly horrific successor to Guernica (1945). Following the war, he became deeply active with the Communist Party, and numerous big films from this era, such as War in Korea (1951), demonstrate his newfound dedication.

Late Years and Death

During the 1950s and 1960s, Pablo Picasso concentrated on his own replicas of great works by artists such as Diego Velázquez, Nicolas Poussin, and El Greco. Picasso sought shelter from his stardom in his final years, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961.

His later works were mainly portrait-based, with almost garish color palettes.

Critics have typically regarded them as inferior to his previous work, however, they have gained a more positive reception in recent decades. During this later phase, he also produced a large number of ceramic and metal sculptures. In 1973, he died of a heart attack in the south of France.

The Various Periods of Picasso’s Artworks

Picasso would spend most of his professional adult life in France. His work has been loosely split into periods of time during which he would completely develop complicated topics and sentiments in order to build a unified body of work. The first period was known as the Blue Period.

The Blue Period (1901-1904)

Picasso’s melancholy phase, during which he directly experienced hardship as well as the effects of deprivation on people around him, is marked by basically monochrome works in tones of blue and blue-green, only sometimes brightened by other colors. Picasso’s paintings from this time period portray starvation, prostitution, and portraits of friend Carlos Casagemas following his death, culminating in the dismal allegorical picture La Vie (1903). La Vie depicted his friend’s inner anguish in the face of a girlfriend he attempted to murder.

In considering Picasso and his Blue Period, journalist and writer Charles Morice famously remarked, “Is this alarmingly precocious youngster not destined to confer the sanctity of a masterwork on the unpleasant sensation of existence, the disease from which he appears to be suffering more than anybody else?”

The Rose Period (1904-1906)

According to the term, Picasso had a more cheerful era incorporating pink and orange colors and the lively worlds of circus performers and harlequins after achieving some level of progress and overcoming some of his despair. The artist then encountered Fernande Olivier, a bohemian painter who would also become his lover. She later appears in a few of these more positive works. Pablo Picasso was extremely well received by the art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein. They were not only his main sponsors but Gertrude was also included in one of his most renowned paintings, Portrait of Gertrude Stein .

African Influences (1907-1909)

The Paul Cezanne exhibition staged at the Salon d’Automne one year after the creator’s death in 1906 was a watershed moment for Picasso. Though Picasso was acquainted with Cezanne before the retrospective, it was not until the exhibition that Picasso realized the full extent of his creative brilliance. Picasso discovered a model for distilling the fundamentals from reality in order to generate a coherent surface that conveyed the artist’s distinct perspective in Cezanne’s works.

Around the same period, the qualities of indigenous African sculpture began to have a strong effect on European painters.

Picasso’s first masterwork was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon . Five nude ladies are depicted in the picture, with bodies composed of flat, fractured surfaces and faces influenced by African masks. A viciously angled cut of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the picture hovers on an unnaturally raised tabletop; the confined space the characters inhabit appears to thrust forward in sharp fragments.

Picasso deviates from conventional European art in this work by incorporating Primitivism and abandoning perspective in lieu of a flat, two-dimensional image plane. It seemed as though the art world had fallen when Les Demoiselles d’Avignon first debuted. Form and presentation as we knew them were utterly discarded. As a result, it was dubbed “the most inventive painting in modern art history.”

Picasso discovered the freedom of expression apart from contemporary and traditional French influences with the new painting tactics he used, and he was able to pave his own path. Formal principles produced during this time paved the way for the Cubist period that followed.

Cubism (1909-1912)

Around 1907, Picasso was driven to give his figures more gravity and form by a convergence of influence ranging from Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne to ancient and tribal artwork. And they eventually led him to Cubism, in which he demolished the perspective standards that had characterized Renaissance painting. During this time period, the style established by Picasso and Braques employed mostly neutral tones and was centered on “breaking apart” items and “evaluating them” in terms of their forms.

Cubism, particularly the second variant known as Synthetic Cubism, had a significant impact on the evolution of the Western art world.

This phase’s works stress the integration, or synthesis, of shapes in the image. Color becomes increasingly significant in the forms of items as they get larger and more beautiful. Non-painted things, such as newspapers or cigarette wrappers, are regularly glued on the canvas alongside painted regions – the inclusion of a wide range of superfluous materials is especially linked with Picasso’s revolutionary collage method. This collage approach highlights texture contrasts and raises the question of what constitutes truth and illusion in painting.

Picasso impacted the course of art for future generations through his use of color, form, and mathematical figures, as well as his unique method of depicting subjects.

Neoclassicism (late 1910s-early 1920s) and Surrealism (mid-1920s)

Picasso made his first journey to Italy in 1917, with an unrivaled command of technique and talent, and immediately began a phase of homage to neoclassical style. Breaking away from severe modernism, he created drawings and paintings evocative of Ingres and Raphael. This was only a prologue to Picasso appearing seamlessly combining his modernist thoughts with his abilities into surrealist masterpieces like Guernica (1937), a frenetic and powerful blend of style that depicts war’s desolation.

“Guernica” is often regarded as modern art’s most devastating anti-war message.

It was done to demonstrate Picasso’s support for the conclusion of the war and his overall denunciation of Nazism. Picasso chose not to depict the tragedy of Guernica in realism or romantic terms from the start. Key characters, such as a lady with extended arms, a bull, and an agonizing horse, are polished in drawing after sketch before being transferred to the expansive painting, which he also remodels multiple times. The somber color scheme and monochromatic theme were utilized to portray the difficult times and the sorrow that was being felt. Guernica questions the heroic nature of the battle and shows it as a horrific act of self-destruction.

The work was not only a functional report or painting, but it also remains a potent political image in modern art, surpassed only by a few frescos by Mexican artist Diego Rivera.

Famous Picasso Paintings

Pablo Picasso’s involvement in Cubism resulted in the growth of collage, in which he rejected the concept of the image as a window on items in the world and started to think of it just as an assemblage of signals that employed various, often metaphorical, techniques to relate to those things. This, too, would have far-reaching consequences for future decades.

Picasso had a diverse attitude to form, and while his work was typically defined by a single dominating approach at any one moment, he frequently moved alternately between multiple styles – occasionally even within the same piece.

His experience with Surrealism influenced not just the delicate shapes and gentle sensuality of pictures of his girlfriend Marie-Therese Walter, but also the sharply jagged iconography of Guernica (1937), the century’s most recognized anti-war artwork. Picasso was always keen to establish himself in history, and some of his most famous pieces, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), allude to a plethora of previous antecedents – even while subverting them.

As he grew older, he became increasingly concerned with ensuring his legacy, and his later work is distinguished by a candid discussion with Old Masters.

The Soup (1903)

The Soup exemplifies Picasso’s Blue Period’s dark sadness, and it was created at the same time as a succession of other paintings devoted to themes of deprivation, aging, and disability. The artwork expresses Picasso’s worry about the deplorable situations he experienced while growing up in Spain, and it was undoubtedly inspired by the religious artwork he grew up with, particularly El Greco. Yet, the artwork represents the broader Symbolist trend of that time.

Picasso eventually regarded his Blue Period works as “nothing except feeling”; reviewers typically sided with him, despite the fact that many of these images are classic and, of course, quite expensive.

https://youtu.be/pQYJqqoR59c?t=95

Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905)

Gertrude Stein was Picasso’s author, personal friend, and even patron, and she was essential in his development as an artist. This picture, in which Stein is dressed in her beloved brown velvet coat, was completed barely a year before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , and it represents a significant step in his maturing style.

In comparison to the flat look of several of the Blue and Rose period paintings, the shapes in this portrait appear nearly carved, and they were inspired by the creator’s study of antique Iberian sculpture.

Picasso’s heightened interest in representing a human face as a sequence of flat planes is practically palpable. Stein said that she sat for Picasso 90 times, and while this may be a hyperbole, Picasso undoubtedly struggled for a long time with portraying her head. After attempting it in numerous ways and failing, he painted it out completely one day, claiming, “I can’t perceive you anymore when I look,” and eventually abandoned the image.

He didn’t finish the head until much later, but without the subject in front of him.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

This artwork astounded even Picasso’s dearest artist colleagues, both in terms of content and technique. The theme of naked females was not uncommon, but Picasso’s portrayal of the girls as prostitutes in blatantly sexual attitudes was novel. Picasso’s fascination with Iberian and indigenous artwork is especially obvious in the mask-like faces of three of the females, hinting that their sexuality is not just violent but also primal.

Pablo Picasso also took his spatial explorations a step further by discarding the Renaissance impression of three-dimensionality in favor of presenting a dramatically flattened image plane split up into geometric fragments, a technique Picasso adopted partially from Paul Cézanne’s brushwork.

For example, the leg of the lady on the left is painted as though seen from many perspectives at the same time; it is difficult to discern the leg from the negative space surrounding it, giving the impression that the two are both in the forefront.

When the picture was ultimately shown in public in 1916, it was largely regarded as immoral.

Braque was one of the few painters who studied it thoroughly in 1907, which led straight to his Cubist partnerships with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles foresaw several of Cubism’s traits, the work is regarded as proto- or pre-Cubism.

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)

This famous artwork is regarded as the earliest collage in modern art. Picasso had previously attached pre-existing items to his paintings, but this is the first occasion he did so with such a humorous and dramatic aim. The chair caning in the image is made of printed oilcloth, not genuine chair caning, as the title implies.

The rope wrapped around the canvas, on the other hand, is extremely genuine and helps to mimic the carved border of a café table.

Moreover, the spectator can think of the canvas as a glass table, and the chair caning as the actual seat of the chair as perceived through the table. As a result, the image not only contrasts visual space significantly, as is characteristic of Picasso’s experimentation, but it also distorts our perception of what we are looking at.

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (1914)

This piece is representative of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he employs numerous techniques to allude to the portrayed things, such as painted dots, shadows, and grains of sand. This paint and mixed media combo is an instance of how Picasso “synthesized” texture and color – inventing wholes after cognitively dissecting the items at hand.

Picasso repressed color during his Analytic Cubist period in order to focus more on the shapes and dimensions of the objects, and this logic certainly informed his predilection for still life all through this period.

The café life undoubtedly summarized modern Parisian life for the painters – he spent a lot of time there conversing with other painters – but the basic array of things also guaranteed that concerns of metaphor and reference could be kept in check.

Ma Jolie (1912)

Picasso explores the boundary between high art and common culture in this painting, pushing his experimentation in new areas. Picasso progresses towards abstraction by diminishing color and heightening the illusion of low-relief sculpture, expanding on the geometric outlines of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon .

Picasso, on the other hand, incorporated painted text on the canvas.

The phrase “ma Jolie” on the cover not only condenses the space more but also links the artwork to a billboard due to their use of an advertisement font. It’s the first instance a painter has publicly utilized elements of popular culture in the creation of high art.

“Ma Jolie” was also the title of a popular tune at the time, as well as Picasso’s nickname for his girlfriend, further tying the painting to popular culture.

The Three Musicians (1921)

There were two versions of Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the musicians. The somewhat smaller version is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, although both are exceptionally enormous for Picasso’s Cubist phase, and he may have decided to create on such a huge scale to commemorate the end of his Synthetic Cubism, which had preoccupied him for over a decade.

He created it during the same summer that he created the extremely dissimilar, classical picture Three Women in the Spring. Some have regarded the images as nostalgic reminiscences of Picasso’s early days; Picasso sits in the middle, as always, the Harlequin, with old acquaintances Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, from whom he had been alienated, on each side.

Three Women at the Spring (1921)

Picasso performed extensive research in preparation for painting this, his most elaborate depiction of an old classical theme. It pays homage to older works by Poussin and Ingres, two titans of classical painting, but it also borrows cues from Greek sculpture , and the figures’ tremendous weight is quite sculptural.

Critics say that the topic attracted him due to the birth of his first son, the figures’ solemn demeanor may be understood by France’s current obsession with remembering the First World War’s deceased.

Guernica (1937)

Picasso painted this painting in response to the shelling of Guernica, a Basque village, on the 26th of April, 1937, amid the Spanish Civil War. It was finished in one month and functioned as the focal point of the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

While it made quite a commotion during the exhibition, it was subsequently barred from being shown in Spain until the deposition of militaristic tyrant Francisco Franco in 1975.

Much work has been spent deciphering the artwork’s significance, and some feel that the suffering horse in the middle of the canvas relates to the citizens of Spain. The minotaur may refer to bullfighting, a popular national pastime in Spain, but it also has a profound personal meaning for the artist.

Although “Guernica” is without a question Modern art’s most iconic reaction to conflict, critics have been split on the painting’s impact.

Recommended Reading

Pablo Picasso’s biography is a detailed and long journey. It is not always possible to fit every bit of information into an article. Perhaps you are keen to explore Picasso’s drawings and paintings even more in your own time. Here you can find more info on Pablo Picasso’s paintings and life.

Life with Picasso (2019) by Francois Gilot

Françoise Gilot’s honest book is the most comprehensive picture of Picasso ever published, providing an intriguing insight into the emotional and creative lives of two modern artists. In 1943, Françoise Gilot was in her early 20 when she met Pablo Picasso, who was 61 at the time. Born from an upper-middle-class household who had the expectation that she would become a lawyer, the young woman disregarded her parents’ desires and pursued a career as an artist. She was one of Picasso’s muses, but she was rather much her own person, driven to become the extraordinary painter she eventually became.

• The most revealing portrait of Pablo Picasso ever written
• Get fascinating insight into the two artist's intense and creative lives
•  A brilliant self-portrait of a young woman of enormous talent

Picasso: Painting the Blue Period (2021) by Kenneth Brummel

Advanced technology exposes hidden compositions, themes, and modifications, as well as previously undisclosed information on the creator’s materials and method, providing new insights into Picasso’s Blue Period. This multidisciplinary book integrates art history and advanced preservation science to demonstrate how the young Picasso crafted a unique look and a distinguishable artistic identification as he evolved the artistic instruction of fin-de-siècle Paris to the political situation of a troubled Barcelona.

• Get new insights into Picasso's famous Blue Period
• A lavishly illustrated volume that re-examines Picasso's Blue Period
• A combination of art history and advanced conservation science

Picasso’s proclivity to create works in a variety of genres gained him widespread acclaim throughout his career. Let us conclude this article with a few more famous Picasso quotes to get a glimpse inside this quirky and creative artist’s mind: “Every youngster has the potential to be an artist. The issue is how to stay an artist as he grows older.” and “I’m always doing what I can’t do so that I can discover how to do it.”

Frequently Asked Questions

When was picasso born and when did picasso die.

Pablo Picasso was born into a creative family on the 25th of October 1881. He was born in Spain, in the city of Malaga. In 1973, he died of a heart attack in the south of France.

Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Picasso spent most of his professional adult life in France. His work has been roughly divided into time periods in which he would totally develop complex ideas and feelings in order to create a coherent body of work. The first phase was referred to as the Blue Period. The diverse spectrum of Pablo Picasso’s artworks was not the product of significant changes in his style during his career, but rather of his devotion to objectively evaluating the form and approach best suited to achieve his intended effect for each art piece. 

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist.” Art in Context. March 2, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/pablo-picasso/

Meyer, I. (2022, 2 March). Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/pablo-picasso/

Meyer, Isabella. “Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist.” Art in Context , March 2, 2022. https://artincontext.org/pablo-picasso/ .

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The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! 

MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

Pablo Picasso's Early Life - Before 1901

Picasso was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad on the 25th October of 1881 in Malago, in southern Spain. Called Pablo Ruiz Picasso after his father and mother, Jose Ruiz Blaso and Maria Picasso Lopez, He later dropped his father's surname to become simply Pablo Picasso. Picasso's family was middle-class; his father was also a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional, academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

In 1892 the family moved to La Coruna, and a year after that Picasso was accepted into the school of Fine and Applied Arts there. As early as 1894, aged 13, he produced his first oil paintings, including portraits of his family, and in 1895, he began to exhibit and sell his work on a small scale. The same year Picasso's seven-year old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria—a is a traumatic event in his life. After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, with Ruiz transferring to its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home. His father persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the impressed jury admitted Picasso, who was 13.

Barcelona would be an important center for Picasso for the next few years. There he would make first artistic friendships and allegiance, with Manuel Pallares, Carlos Casagemas and Jami Sabartes. By the turn of the century Picasso had begun to associate with the artists and writers of Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.

Picasso's father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, the country's foremost art school. In 1897, Picasso, age 16, set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and quit attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid, however, held many other attractions: the Prado housed paintings by the venerable Diego Velázquez , Rembrandt van Rijn , and Johannes Vermeer . Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco and Caravaggio ; their elements, the elongated limbs, arresting colors, and mystical visages, are echoed in Picasso's oeuvre.

Paris was the desired destination of these young artists, and in October 1900 Picasso made his first trip there in the company of Casagemas, with whom he rented a studio. Picasso visited the Louvre, and set up a contact with a Catalan dealer, Pere Manach, to act as his model. In early 1901 Picasso discovered that Casagemas has committed suicide in Paris. In May that year, he went back to Paris, moving into the studio of the sculptor Namolo, and in the autumn he created several haunting works in memory of his dead friend.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The old guitarist, girl before a mirror, three musicians, the weeping woman, the women of algiers, dora maar au chat, girl with mandolin, portrait of gertrude stein, family of saltimbanques, portrait of ambroise vollard, massacre in korea.

Art History and Artists

Pablo picasso.

• Occupation: Artist
• Born: October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain
• Died: April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France
• Famous works: The Pipes of Pan, Three Musicians, Guernica, The Weeping Woman
• Style/Period: Cubism , Modern Art

• His full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Wow!
• His mother once told him when he was a child that "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope."
• In the 1930s Picasso became fascinated with the mythical creature the Minotaur. This creature had the body of a man and the head of a bull. It appeared in many of his pieces of art.
• He produced over 1,800 paintings and 1,200 sculptures.
• Many of his paintings have been sold for over $100 million!
• He was married twice and had four children.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

The miraculous year when Picasso became Picasso

MADRID and PARIS — Last year marked 50 years since Picasso’s death, and more than 50 major exhibitions around the world have observed the occasion. But the Spaniard’s life was long, and it’s worth remembering that it’s 116 years since he painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which (along with “Guernica” ) is usually cited as his masterpiece.

That might make the revelations in a new exhibition in Madrid seem like ancient history. But “Picasso 1906: The Turning Point,” at the Reina Sofia Museum (through March 4) is one of the most engrossing Picasso exhibits I’ve ever seen.

Yes, the focus is almost perversely narrow. (Just one year in the life of this most monstrously fecund of artists?!) And no, in 1906, Picasso hadn’t yet invented (with Georges Braque) the revolutionary pictorial language known as cubism. But in 1906, Picasso was right on the cusp of the discoveries that made him singular.

Almost every celebrated artist has a period lasting perhaps a year or two when you can see things crystallize — when the artist becomes, in effect, the one we all come to recognize. Very few artists can say that the crystallization process involved the invention of a new relationship between art and reality.

Pablo Picasso did this for the first time in 1906.

From then on, of course, he never stopped inventing. But for all the pyrotechnic fascinations of his later metamorphoses, Picasso’s work was never quite as intimate, fragile and trembling with potential as it was in 1906. Everything he did that year seems to shiver and shake with a sense of its own freshness, its foreignness — like a mutant hatchling no one quite recognizes.

At first, the transformation is subtle. Nothing from 1906 looks as radical as “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” his painting of five hostile women in a brothel. But when you see the full scope of what Picasso achieved in 1906, it is like watching a dozen live wires being lashed together. Sparks pinwheel outward. Art is changed forever.

1906 was the year that Picasso painted his new friend and supporter, Gertrude Stein. Happily, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns that masterful portrait , has lent it to the Madrid exhibition. Unfortunately, that meant it couldn’t be included in “Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso: The Invention of Language,” an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris (through Jan. 28). The Paris show traces not just Stein’s influence on Picasso, and vice versa, but Stein’s longer-term impact on avant-garde art.

Stein had settled in Paris in 1903. Her studies in language and psychology under William James at Harvard had made her receptive to experimental art. She and her brother Leo, as well as Leo’s sister Sarah and Sarah’s husband, Michael, were early champions of Henri Matisse. In 1906, Matisse was unquestionably ahead of Picasso when it came to radical transformations to the art of painting. (If you want to see what was firing Picasso’s competitive impulses that year, it’s worth visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s sun-drenched winter exhibition, “Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain and the Origins of Fauvism,” through Jan. 21).

Gertrude and Leo ran a salon on the rue de Fleurus, which some have described as the first museum of modern art. When Stein met Picasso, she thought the 24-year-old Spaniard beautiful. He was physically compact and full of energy, and his gaze was piercing. In Paris, they were both outsiders: she, a Jewish American lesbian heiress living in the 6th Arrondissement; he, a Spaniard living in bohemian Montmartre, a friend of poets and anarchists.

The company Picasso kept made him suspicious in the eyes of the French authorities. Yet another Picasso exhibition, at Gagosian in New York, hinges on Picasso’s precarious status as an expat in France. The show emerges from “A Foreigner Called Picasso,” a recent revisionist biography by Annie Cohen-Solal, who points out that Picasso was denied French citizenship on the one occasion he applied for it (1940) and claims that he lived most of his life under constant threat of deportation.

After Stein sat for her new friend (the portrait famously required several months and dozens of sittings), she began to write about him . She laced her lines with repetitions (“exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling,” etc.) and surprising inversions of logic. In the Paris show, it’s fascinating to see how profoundly Stein’s writing influenced such artists as Bruce Nauman, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Andy Warhol and Glenn Ligon.

Still, the “Picasso 1906” show in Madrid is the superior exhibition.

One thing it reveals is that Picasso’s portrait of Stein is an outlier. Stein is clothed, whereas most of the figures Picasso depicted in 1906 were nude. He had been drawing and painting nudes since the turn of the century, using them to express melancholy and desolation (in his popular, if maudlin, Blue Period) or to trigger erotic responses.

But in 1906, things changed. Picasso’s bodies took on a new fullness and vitality. His girlfriend, Fernande Olivier, had changed her name (from Amélie Lang) after escaping an abusive relationship with another man. She and Picasso were intensely in love. In the summer, before he finished his portrait of Stein, the two lovers went to Gósol, a small village in the Pyrenees inhabited by smugglers.

The mountain air and the escape from the competitive claustrophobia of Paris seemed to liberate Picasso. He worked incredibly hard, constantly driving toward a new simplicity of outline and pumping volume into the emaciated figures of his Blue Period.

There is a palpable sensuality in the work Picasso made in Gósol. But it doesn’t feel lascivious. Rather, it is tender and curious. Picasso’s every line carves out new kinds of softness, as he seeks a new, probing relationship with reality.

At the same time, it harks back to something simpler, nobler, less constrained by convention. Other avant-garde artists, recoiling from industrialization and a sense of civilizational corruption, had been thinking along similar lines for a while. Various Arcadian visions emerged: Van Gogh went to Arles, Gauguin to Tahiti. Seurat tried to harmonize science and nature. Matisse painted “The Joy of Life.”

But Picasso’s pictures from 1906 can make those others look fussy and calculated. His pictures are raw, delicate, incomplete. They evoke the quiet uncoiling of a hidden force rather than anything triumphant or finished.

One of Picasso’s key works from 1906 is “Nude with Joined Hands,” a large painting Stein came to own and from which she never parted. Picasso started it in Gósol and finished it back in Paris. It shows a young woman with tan-colored skin against a rich pink background. Although the contours are clear, there are few firm outlines. The brushstrokes are soft and pillowy. The model’s shoulders are sloping, her breasts small and devoid of nipples. The weight of the woman’s body falls on one leg as she seems to step forward, clasping her hands in front of her sex.

Her face, with its pinhole eyes and rudimentary modeling, reveals the recent influence on Picasso of ancient Iberian sculptures and Romanesque carvings. Picasso, like Matisse, had also become fascinated by wooden statuettes and masks from Africa. Examples of all these are included in the Madrid show.

Seeing them all side by side, it becomes clear that Picasso was not just trying to digest miscellaneous inspirations. He was beginning to value transformation as an end in itself . The stylistic characteristics of one source were interchangeable with another. Olivier’s face could be made to look like Picasso’s, the innkeeper Josep Fondevila’s like an African mask, and so on.

The implications were profound. What if visual styles and symbols were as arbitrary as language? What if you suddenly exchanged one kind of description for another? Would meaning simply collapse? Or would new kinds of meaning emerge?

In 1906, Picasso began to explore these questions, which also interested Stein, with unprecedented creative ferocity. When he returned to Paris, he quickly reworked his portrait of Stein, painting in a masklike face with simplified, sculptural faceting and asymmetrical eyes, then promptly declared the portrait done.

Then, as he worked on “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” he replaced two of the nude figures’ faces with African-style masks, hoping to transform the picture, he later said, into a tool for “exorcism.” He stylized the bodies with a new kind of jagged outline that is hard to distinguish from the faceted background. Knitting together figure and ground in this way created shallow, ambiguous space, heightening effects he had seen in Cezanne and, before him, El Greco. His approach led directly into cubism.

Cubism changed everything — and not just in art. Dovetailing with new developments in science, it unleashed new perspectives on the relationship between reality and representation and on the effect observers might have on what they observed. It also fired Picasso with the Promethean conviction — not unfounded, it turns out — that he could do almost anything.

“Picasso 1906. The Turning Point” is at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, through March 4. museoreinasofia.es

“Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso: the Invention of Language” is at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, through Jan. 28. museeduluxembourg.fr

“A Foreigner Called Picasso” is at Gagosian, West 21st Street, in New York, through Feb. 10. gagosian.com

Pablo Picasso Biography

Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, was a born genius whose prodigious work took the world of art by storm. From a young age, Picasso dedicated his time to drawing and painting, surpassing the talent and skills of his father by the age of 13. He went on to diversify his artistic pursuits, including sculpting, ceramic designing, and stage designing. Picasso’s groundbreaking contribution to art was the development of Cubism, which broke the classical dominance of content over form. Through his iconic work ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ Picasso gave birth to the modern art movement of the 20th century.

Quick Facts

• Born Country: Spain
• City: Málaga, Spain
• Died on: April 8, 1973
• Place of death: Mougins, France
• Died At Age: 91
• Spouse/Ex-: Jacqueline Roque (m. 1961– 1973), Olga Khokhlova (m. 1918; d. 1955)
• Father: Don José Ruiz y Blasco
• Mother: María Picasso y López
• Children: Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, Paloma Picasso, Paul Joseph Picasso
• Partner: Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Ancestry: Italian Spanish
• Notable Alumni: Real Academia De Bellas Artes De San Fernando
• Cause of Death: Pulmonary Edema
• Education: Real Academia De Bellas Artes De San Fernando
• 1950 – Stalin Peace Prize
• 1962 – Lenin Peace Prize

Childhood & Early Life

Pablo Picasso was born on 25 October 1881, in Málaga, Spain, to Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His father was a painter and arts teacher by profession.

While at school, Picasso’s brilliance as a painter overshadowed his poor academic records. Mentored by his father, he surpassed his old man in terms of skill and talent by the age of 13.

In 1895, his family relocated to Barcelona, Spain. The move proved to be fruitful for him as he got an opportunity to enroll at the prestigious ‘School of Fine Arts.’ However, strict rules laid down at the school frustrated him. He began skipping classes to wander on the streets of Barcelona, sketching whatever he observed.

In 1897, he moved to Madrid to attend the ‘Royal Academy of San Fernando.’ However, the rules and formal instructions irked him to such an extent that he stopped attending classes. He moved around the lanes of Madrid, observing and painting what appealed his vision. He visited the Prado museum to see paintings by famous Spanish painters.

Returning to Barcelona in 1899, he found himself to be a part of a group of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a cafe called, El Quatre Gats. It was during this time that he moved away from his classical methods to indulge avant-garde art.

With Paris deemed as the world center for avant-garde art, it was only natural for him to relocate to the city. At the dawn of the new century, he moved to Paris to be at the epicentre of the world of art.

He opened an art studio in Montmartre, Paris. Despite being a teenager, he had the technique to come up with any style, and the insight to know the importance of each style.

Historians have separated his works from different periods. As such, from 1901 to 1904, his works were categorized under ‘Blue Period.’ Just as the name suggests, most of his works from this period were marked by sombre paintings in shades of blue and bluish-green, only intermittently having shades of other colors.

He applied various techniques during his period, starting from the blurred technique to divisionism and expressionism. The subject that he chose ranged from poverty and isolation to anguish and melancholy. Some of his famous paintings from this period include, ‘Blue Nude,’ ‘La Vie,’ and ‘The Old Guitarist.’

Succeeding the ‘Blue Period’ was the ‘Rose Period’ which lasted from 1904 to 1906, during which the color pink dominated most of his works. Most of his paintings depicted people working at the circus, acrobats, and harlequins. Additionally, his works showcased the warm relationship that he shared with Fernande Olivier.

In contrast to the ‘Blue Period,’ paintings which came during the ‘Rose Period’ were of happy and upbeat nature with optimism and spirit of buoyancy apparent in them. This style was predominantly seen in his earlier works from 1899 and 1900.

In 1907, he, along with his friend Georges Braque, came up with a remarkable work that none until then had ever painted. Consisting of sharp geometric shapes, ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ showcased five nude prostitutes, abstracted and distorted, with glaring blotches of blues, greens, and grays. The work became the precursor and inspiration of ‘Cubism,’ an artistic style that the two invented.

The main technique behind Cubist works was breaking up and reassembling of objects in abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes, and depicting them from multiple viewpoints simultaneously in order to create physics-defying, collage-like effect.

The Cubist style employed by him in his works became a revolutionary movement in the art world. Some of his memorable paintings of this era include ‘Three Women,’ ‘Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table,’ ‘Girl with Mandolin,’ ‘Still Life with Chair Caning,’ and ‘Card Player.’

The changing panorama of the world, which was at the juncture of ‘World War I,’ brought about the next change in his art form. From the abstract and the distorted form, he moved to depicting the sombre reality of the world in his works.

Some of his neoclassical works that depict his return to realism from 1918 to 1929 include ‘Three Women at the Spring,’ ‘Two Women Running on the Beach,’ ‘The Race,’ and ‘The Pipes of Pan.’

An avid believer of experimentation and innovation, he did not remain stuck with classicalism for long and caught up with a new philosophical and cultural craze which was known as ‘Surrealism.’

The harlequin was replaced by minotaur as the common motif in his work and the works of other Surrealist painters. His most outstanding and notable work from this time period was the ‘Guernica.’

‘Guernica’ stands as a testament for the brutality, inhumanity, and vicious nature of war. Painted in 1937 after the devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica, it remains the greatest anti-war painting of all time. It has shades of black, white, and gray and illustrates several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror.

At the end of ‘World War II,’ he turned to politics. He joined the ‘French Communist Party’ and attended the ‘World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace’ in Poland. However, critical comments attracted by his Stalin painting lessened his interest in politics, though he remained a loyal member of the ‘Communist Party.’

Personal Life & Legacy

An ardent womanizer, he had a number of relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses, and prostitutes. He was married twice. In 1918, he married a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova. The couple, who was blessed with a son, parted ways in 1927. However, they were not legally divorced and the marriage ended only in 1955 after Khokhlova’s death.

While being married to Khokhlova, he was in a romantic relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. He fathered a daughter from the relationship.

He married Jacqueline Roque in 1961, at the age of 80. With her, he had two children.

He breathed his last on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France. His mortal remains were later interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence.

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Opening reception: Thursday, June 6, 6–8pm

The Body as Matter

Giacometti nauman picasso, june 6–july 26, 2024 grosvenor hill, london.

Left: Alberto Giacometti working in his studio, Paris, 1956. Artwork © Succession Alberto Giacometti/DACS 2024. Photo: Pierre Vauthey/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images. Middle: Bruce Nauman in his studio at the University of California, Davis, 1965. Artwork © 2024 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and DACS, London. Photo: courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York. Right: Pablo Picasso working in his sculpture studio at Le Fournas, Valluris, France, 1953. Artwork © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024. Photo: Edward Quinn © edwardquinn.com

Gagosian is pleased to announce  The Body as Matter: Giacometti  Nauman  Picasso , an exhibition of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Curated by Richard Calvocoressi, the exhibition is on view at the Grosvenor Hill gallery from June 6 to July 26, 2024.

Radical investigations of the human body and how we perceive it characterize the distinct sculptural practices of Giacometti, Nauman, and Picasso, who are widely regarded as defining figures of their respective generations. From the modernist preoccupation with the fragmented or disintegrated body typical of Picasso’s and Giacometti’s work to the postmodern expansion of sculpture into a range of environmental and anti-monumental forms exemplified by Nauman’s, this is the first exhibition to juxtapose sculptures by these three artists. It features classic pieces by all three, including Picasso’s La femme enceinte I (1950) and Bras vertical  (1961), Giacometti’s La jambe  (1958) and Grande tête (1960), and Nauman’s Henry Moore Bound to Fail  (1967–70) and Model for Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care  (1984).

A pioneer of Cubism best known for his paintings, drawings, and collages, Picasso produced numerous sculptures, which are among his most experimental works. He primarily sculpted in two distinct modes: modeling clay or plaster for casting into bronze, and constructing or assembling forms from discarded objects and cheap materials such as sheet metal, wood, and cardboard. In works of astonishing wit and originality, not to mention erotic suggestiveness, Picasso investigated means of manipulating mass and surface to incorporate multiple perspectives into a single head, limb, or figure.

In Paris in the 1920s Giacometti came under the influence of Surrealism, encouraging him to incorporate into his sculptures a sense of sexual violence or threat that Nauman would later take up. Giacometti’s modeled and cast sculptures from the postwar period—fragile, highly textured, and strikingly elongated—broke away from the conventions of classical sculpture to evoke instead the survivors of some human or natural catastrophe. These depictions of the fractured and vulnerable figure or of isolated body parts appear frozen in motion, prompting reflections on mortality. Focusing almost exclusively on the body, Giacometti’s paring of the figure to its bare essentials challenged tradition and paved the way for contemporary artists to consider new possibilities.

Since the 1960s Nauman has pursued a varied practice that builds on Picasso’s and Giacometti’s innovations. Nauman produces work in sculpture, performance, video, and neon that confront viewers with their own physical limitations and employs repetitive actions, linguistic play, and stark imagery to disrupt perception and thought. The artist’s invocation of corporeal presence echoes Giacometti’s, yet he visualizes the human condition through the prisms of contemporary culture and modern technology. Addressing concerns such as the effect of surveillance and the allure of instant gratification, Nauman’s works require the viewer’s physical presence and mental engagement to activate them.

Giacometti, Nauman, and Picasso have all redefined sculpture—reshaping traditional mediums and pioneering new ones. Picasso’s groundbreaking move away from a naturalistic representation of the human form was extended by Giacometti, whose elongated, modeled, and cast figures draw attention to material and process, while evoking the artist’s struggle to capture a living, breathing presence in three dimensions. Nauman often uses his own body as subject, and encourages the viewer to become an involved participant. For all three artists, the space we occupy, the ways we are perceived, and our effect on others are crucial elements in their unique methods of existential inquiry.

Grosvenor Hill, London

20 Grosvenor Hill London  W1K 3QD

+44 20 7495 1500 [email protected]

Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6

Alberto Giacometti Bruce Nauman Pablo Picasso

Press release (PDF)

[email protected] [email protected]

Gagosian [email protected]

Toby Kidd [email protected] +44 20 7495 1500

Bolton & Quinn Sylvia Ross [email protected] +44 20 7221 5000

From the Quarterly

Behind the Art A Foreigner Called Picasso

Join president of the Picasso Museum, Paris, Cécile Debray; curator, writer, biographer, and historian Annie Cohen-Solal; art historian Vérane Tasseau; and Gagosian director Serena Cattaneo Adorno as they discuss  A Foreigner Called Picasso . Organized in association with the Musée national Picasso–Paris and the Palais de la Porte Dorée–Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, the exhibition reframes our perception of Picasso and focuses on his status as a permanent foreigner in France.

A Foreigner Called Picasso

Cocurator of the exhibition  A Foreigner Called Picasso , at Gagosian, New York, Annie Cohen-Solal writes about the genesis of the project, her commitment to the figure of the outsider, and Picasso’s enduring relevance to matters geopolitical and sociological.

Fashion and Art: Pieter Mulier

Pieter Mulier, creative director of Alaïa, presented his second collection for the legendary house in Paris in January 2022. After the presentation, Mulier spoke with Derek Blasberg about the show’s inspirations, including a series of ceramics by Pablo Picasso, and about his profound reverence for the intimacy and artistry of the atelier.

The Art of Biography: Sir John Richardson’s “The Minotaur Years”

Pepe Karmel celebrates the release of  A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943 , the final installment of Sir John Richardson’s magisterial biography.

Game Changer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Michael Cary pays homage to the visionary dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979).

Game Changer Grace McCann Morley

Berit Potter pays homage to the ardent museum leader who transformed San Francisco’s relationship to modern art.

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